Ted Kooser, Career Choices, and Northerness

This is Ted Kooser, the recent Poet Laureate of the United States, serving two terms from 2004-2006. I had heard about him a while back when I was at NSA. In fact, I think that Aaron Wrench told me about him. Aaron is always interviewing some interesting celebrity and I think Aaron even asked Kooser to write him a recommendation to get into the creative writing MFA at U of I. So Ted Kooser stuck in my mind back then and I heard him again recently on NPR. Kooser writes poems that are both understandable, which I like, and poetic at the same time--Imagine that. Here's a quote in which he explains how he wants to be considerate to the "strangers of poetry," which I must admit that I mostly am:

"Every stranger's tolerance for poetry is compromised by much more important demands on his or her time. Therefore, I try to honor my reader's patience and generosity by presenting what I have to say as clearly and succinctly as possible .... Also, I try not to insult the reader's good sense by talking down; I don't see anything to gain by alluding to intellectual experiences that the reader may not have had. I do what I can to avoid being rude or offensive; most strangers, understandably, have a very low tolerance for displays of pique or anger or hysteria. Being harangued by a poet rarely endears a reader. I am also extremely wary of over cleverness; there is a definite limit to how much intellectual showing off a stranger can tolerate." - Midwest Quarterly, 1999

Another thing about Kooser that piqued my interest is that he worked in insurance for many, many years, I think until he retired, first as a salesman and then as the vice president of a company. And he was still able after all of that mind-numbing sales and administrative work to be creative. My passion is studying and interpreting history, but I often feel that my skills as a reader, teacher, writer and public speaker are not such as to earn me much of a living or allow me much time to give to a future family while earning it, therefore I take comfort that history and perhaps even some success in writing or teaching may be waiting for me when I retire from a more regular sort of job.

Here is just one poem of Kooser’s, which I pulled off his website, tedkooser.com, entitled "Flying at Night:"

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

That poem is about what C.S Lewis called "northerness," the consciousness of great spaces or distances, the stars above and the earth beneath, even great caverns in the earth beneath and the molten core of the earth and the space on the other side and the fact that the earth is suspended in space. It's enough to give one vertigo. I wish that I would spend more time thinking about such things than I do. It puts career choices in perspective, a very healthy sort of thought. But of course, unless we are going to be ungrateful existentialists, the thought cannot stop there. The conclusion of such thoughts is that God is great. God can span all of those distances between his thumb and pinky.